India’s second largest software exporter Infosys is moving closer to rolling out its ambitious delayering exercise.

In an interview, COO Pravin Rao said Infosys may look at rolling out the delayering exercise across the company sometime in the next financial year, possibly after another quarter.

“Our engineering services unit — that is where we’ve started the pilot. Once we’re confident that it’s moving in the right direction, we’ll do it at scale and extend it to the rest of the organisation,” said Infosys veteran Rao, who has also been a board member since January 2014.

“Sometime in the coming year, in FY17. The pilot has been underway for just a quarter and we’ll probably look at one more quarter before extending it to the rest of the organisation,” added Rao.

ET had first reported on January 18 that Infosys is looking to cut down redundant organizational layers and working on a pilot with 10,000 people where it has broken down its traditional, five-layer organizational structure into a two-tiered one.

CEO Vishal Sikka who refers to this model as the “reverse pyramid” elaborated on the model at the Kotak Institutional Equities Investor Conference — Chasing Growth 2016 in Mumbai.

“In certain service lines, we are trying out a radical delayering… and create this reverse pyramid where the project managers and teams are in front working directly with customers and taking decisions,” said Sikka.

As India’s largest software firms have added tens of thousands of employees over the past decade, many layers of middle management have in the process also been underutilized since they are not billable employees anymore as they are not directly involved in day-to-day software coding. “We’ve seen that people who are not getting billed, they also tend to get a little bit away from technology and so on.

The best way to address that is to make them more active in project execution — that’s the whole notion,” said Rao. Infosys is also opening up its Zero Bench marketplace — a way to give employees on the bench experience on projects — to its clients, Sikka said at the investor summit.

Under Zero Bench — an idea that Sikka has piloting at the company — project managers put up projects on the internal marketplace and employees on the bench apply to work on them.

“About 70% of the people on the bench have at least worked on one project in the Zero Bench program. Though it does not affect our utilization rate as it is measured by analysts. We are working on more projects such as giving clients access to post their requirements on the marketplace,” said Sikka adding that client contribution to Zero Bench was in the early stage.

Sikka said the company’s zero bench marketplace has over 10,000 jobs listed and over 2,000 jobs had been completed.

Opening the marketplace to its clients could improve billing as then Infosys could charge for the service, investors at the conference said.